Cryptune is a free daily music word puzzle. Every day at midnight one new puzzle appears, and it is the same puzzle for every player in the world. You are given a short row of cryptic clue tiles. Each tile hides exactly one word. Work out the words, put them in order, and you have the name of an artist, a song or an album.
There is nothing to install and no account to create. The game runs in your browser, and your scores and streak are saved on your own device.
The whole game rests on one idea borrowed from cryptic crosswords: a clue never says what it means. Here is a two tile puzzle, labelled Artist.
COLD + PLAY = Coldplay
Neither clue mentions music. "Freeze" is not asking about the weather, it is pointing at the word COLD. "Act on stage" is pointing at PLAY. Individually they are small satisfactions. Together they become something you recognise, and that second step is where the game actually lives.
Nothing has been hidden from you. Every word you need is on the screen from the moment the puzzle loads. You simply cannot see it yet.
A straight music quiz asks whether you know a fact. You either do or you do not, and there is nowhere to go if you do not. A cryptic puzzle asks something different: it gives you a route to the answer and dares you to follow it. That means a puzzle is still solvable when the artist is one you have barely heard of, because the clues are made of ordinary English rather than music trivia.
It also means the answer arrives in a particular way. Not as a fact retrieved, but as a recognition, the sort that feels less like solving and more like remembering. That half second between having the words and seeing what they spell is the reason the game exists.
Some days it takes twenty seconds. Some days a tile refuses to fall for ten minutes and then seems obvious forever afterwards.
Go deeper: full rules and scoring, the clue school covering all six clue types, music by decade, or the artist index.